Today's Dress: Summer!

1960s Dress - Gingermegs Vintage

 

 

Photo - Gingermegs Vintage

Lipstick - MAC Retro

Earrings - Aspire

Cardigan - F&F via charity shop

Nail Varnish - Essie In Stitches

Blue & Pink Bangles - charity shops, Yellow Bakelite Bangle - OLL Swap & Sell Group

Shoes - Clarks

Bag - Ro via Blighty Bazaar

Altering a Red 1940s Nylon Plisse Dress

Yesterday I accomplished one of the hardest alterations I've done in a while. I bought this 1940s nylon plisse dress online against my better judgement. I was swayed by red and sparkly buttons.

I much prefer to be able to try things on because even if you have all of the measurements, things don't always fit as well as you'd look. In this case, the waist fit but the shoulders were much too big (16" v. the 13.5-14" I needed) and this made the entire top half of the dress puff out like I was wearing a sack.

It took an entire day. I unpicked the sleeves and side seams to the waist and calculated how much I needed to take the shoulders in. I traced the edges of the sleeves onto paper to make a template for the armhole shape. I used the template to take the top half in by 3.4cm from each side. I pinned the sleeves in place to determine how much I needed to take in the upper waist. After taking in the upper waist (including repositioning the top half of the zip), I matched these seam joins with those of the sleeves and sewed the sleeves in.

As the original thread was disintegrating, I went over all of the seams with running stitch and then zigzagged the raw edges. As the original buttons were losing rhinestones and pinned, I added snap fastenings and sewed new sparkly buttons over these.

I'm much happier with the dress now.

 

Vintage buttons - B2B Vintage Fair

Original buttons. Photo from denisebrain's Etsy

 

 

 

I also went over all of the inside seams as the thread was disintegrating.

I then zigzagged all of the raw edges.

I machine darned a small hole in the skirt.

I used the fabric cut from the shoulders/arm holes to mend the hole.

Fixing a 1940s Strawberry Print Dress

I bought this 1940s strawberry print dress from Gingermegs Vintage two years ago. It fits again now and as I'd been unsuccessful at selling it on eBay while it was too small, I decided to see what I could do to it to make me like it again. The main issue - and probably why it didn't sell - was there were several conspicious areas where the fabric needed mending. These had only come about after I washed the dress for the first time.

After this I machine darned the fabric but as you can see from the photos it looked really ugly, particularly the area on the front of the dress by the left shoulder.

I unpicked the machine stitching yesterday and redarned it by hand. The areas still looked conspicious because of the amount of stitches needed to repair the fabric. I decided to add ric rac flowers to cover the darned areas. To add strength to the fabric, these are backed in yellow cotton. I wanted orange ricrac flowers the same shade of orange as the strawberries and matching red beads.

Unfortunately, my local fabric market only had ricrac in bright orange, tomato red and green. The orange and the red were much too bright for the dress. I decided on the green as the closest shade. I sewed on a greater density of red seed beads to counteract the brighness of the green.

The overall effect isn't perfect as the green flowers still stand out a bit too much but I can counteract this by wearing the dress with an orange cardigan. It's definitely better than having a dress which feels too shabby to wear and that I'm unable to sell.

Before

Before - Hem area

Before - Area at the top of the dress below the right shoulder

Before - Area at the top of the dress below the left shoulder

Before - Darning on the right shoulder

After

After - Area at the top of the dress below the left shoulder

After - Area at the top of the dress below the right shoulder

After - Left side of the dress skirt

After